Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/93

 dangerous pause in the World War, that temptations of an extraordinary character were dangled before her eyes is an undisputed fact.

And yet even these Notes, with their untenable doctrine of geographical propinquity, did not capture will-o'-the-wisp China. They assisted, no doubt, in the promotion of the peculiar Japanese policy of the period 1917-18, when so many hundreds of millions of dollars were lent to the Peking Government on ruinous terms to be squandered on a meaningless civil war; but internationally they were failures. England, still the chief Western Power in Eastern Asia, did not recede from the position she took up in her treaty of 1911—that she possessed special interests in China as well as Japan, and that these special interests, British as well as the Japanese special interests, must be maintained. This is a very important fact which has never been given its proper importance: it is a fact which even now troubles Japan.

And then at last Bolshevism, invading Asiatic Russia in the spring of 1918, brought a new complication; for although there never was any German menace to the Far East as Japanese agents declared, there was certainly a menace to Japanese plans. In the long story